Wild Card Madness!

Posted in Uncategorized by Flavor on October 4, 2017

Now THAT is how a bullpen should operate. None of this 1/3 of an inning bs–uh, unless you’re talking about the starting pitcher. Yikes. 26 out from the bullpen. You can say what you want about the “Javier Lopezesesezezes” of the world but those 4 dudes stepped up in a big way. And 13 of the outs, HALF, were strikeouts. That’s huge.

But they don’t win without the bombs they hit. Power. The Yankees have it. By the way, if you want to see a stunning home run chart that could easily be titled “The Team That Home Runs Forgot” check this out (players with at least 15 HR’s on each team):

Yes, you cannot win consistently without pitching. But you also cannot win with just one lonely guy on your team’s bar chart. Buster Posey hit one home run since July 15th. That is not normal or acceptable for someone with his responsibilities and pay grade.

Rockies have their hands full tonight, I’m not certain Jon Gray is up for this moment. But the Rox hitters hit Grienke good. So this could be another good one tonight.

F/G had column on Stros, who had big increase in offense while getting more walks to go with power. Dodgers led NL in walks too. Don’t forget, Yanks pitching held other teams runs down 3rd best in AL too.

Depressing presser yesterday re: Evans and Sabes. Doesn’t sound like they are into acquiring power bat, and emphasize pitching and defense and getting younger. So that would seem to indicate a big “no” on trading Bum.
Also no on Lorenzo Cain, though maybe Moustakas at 28 might still be in picture. Sounds more like they are after a Marisnick type or someone’s prospect minor leaguer.

And if they value D, also a no on trading Panik. Who else is there to trade in order to get legit middle order hitter into the LU? The Marlins aren’t salary dumping Ozuna or Yelich for Parker and Blach.

That was the usual depressing conference with the 4 stooges yesterday.Sabes showed the most spark but does it really matter?
Get younger with better D right.When you have Pence&Span splitting time are both still out there with the Gorkster whatever..
Cheap bastards probably won’t even make a play for F/A JD Martinez..

Sabes said he knew by May Giants were screwed, given terrible start by some of the hitters, the injuries and Bum going down and other teams like AZ Rox LA doing so well, mostly at Giants expense. So why wasn’t anything done all season except to trade off Nunez and Kontos?

No salary dumps of high priced vets like Span or Pence, no IF help beyond Specs and Sando, no Belt trade before he got beaned, no one to help the OF beyond Drew Stubbs/Moncrief/Ruggiano, no looking for LH reliever either.

Yes, very depressing “news” conference. As if no major moves needed after one and a half seasons of merde. The only hope is they were sandbagging. I am starting to believe this team is run by bean counters, and real estate developers, not baseball people. The baseball team is just a business unit, managed to keep the bottom line strong for the entire company…

Right. My biggest beef is the shitty OF. We KNEW it was shitty before the season started, and that was predicated on Span and Pence not sucking big hairy donkey balls for all eternity.

So what did they do? When they KNEW they were doomed by the end of April? NOTHING. They raised the white flag in May and just coasted through the season. They should refund the season ticket holders’ money for the utter disdain they had for the product on the field.

They should of known right out of the gate they were not gonna get it done with this aging team and inexperienced youngsters filling in..
They decided screw the year early on and let’s get shovels in the ground in their Mission Rock project instead..

Well, there is always the crazy idea the Giants could lower their ticket prices next season to actually reflect the quality of the product. Then, go for the big tear-down and rebuild, and trust the fans to understand what’s going on. The Giants brass could be really honest with the fans about what’s going on. Yeah, the attendance could drop for a while, but it’s going to drop anyway if the brass pretends that the team is couple of tweaks away from contending again.

that’s what I’m trying to figure out: are they “pretending” or do they really believe that? Cause the attendance and season ticket holders WILL bail at some point. And when they do are they going to just keep stubbornly trying to build a team of pitching and defense with no fucking hitters anywhere?????

The letter from Larry Baer that just landed in my email isn’t predicting a tear down of anything (except maybe fixtures in the parking lot that have to go before construction projects can begin–and that’s not mentioned explicitly, of course). Baer does, however, vaguely mention the importance of improving both offense and defense in the OF.

Bochy was hilarious near the end of the season with some of his quotes. Things like “yeah, we’re scuffling a bit.” “We need to get our bats going.” “Our pitchers have been snake-bit lately.” Oh, OK. He only left out “the dog ate our homework.”

Except that half the teams in the top 10 didn’t make the playoffs. Thing is, we aren’t going to climb the chart any time soon. Unless Arroyo suddenly grows 30 lb of muscle, Posey rediscovers his power stroke, and we don’t trade Belt.

On the MLB Network, one of the pundits said, only half-jokingly, that if the Yankees had lost the one-game Wild Card match, then that would have been the end of the one-game format in the future. That would not have been out of the realm of possibility.

We hit something like 25 more homeruns this year than 2012, We almost as many HRs as we did in 2014 (3 less I think). Your premise is flawed. Home runs are nice. But over 100 years of playoffs has taught us that teams with outstanding pitching and defense are the ones that do the best.

And it’s not close. Only 3 teams that have won the WS have been mediocre with pitching & defense and made it on offense. Yet one-third of WS winners have, basically, mediocre on offense yet stellar in pitching and defense.

I don’t see a premise, I see a pattern. Also it’s important to remember that this year is, famously, different than other post juice era years. Different really than all other years. It’s gonna take some time and analysis to put the truisms of the past into present perspective.

if the league continues to juice the balls, and I don’t see why they would ever stop, how is there a way around this? You need good pitching obviously. But you can’t win without the 3 run bombs anymore. Too many guys are hitting them.

If all they did was tighten the seams, maybe it was a technological change–better machines pounding the stitches, just as focused LED lights at the park replaced the old fashioned lights. Lots of reports say the new seams are key (ask Cueto, I suppose). If that’s right, would they go back? Hell no. More important, maybe: did they test the new product? Given the resources available these days, why wouldn’t they? Anyway, I think the new juiced ball is here to stay.

Three run bomb in the first inning puts the Dbacks up 3-0. Didi hit a 3 run bomb in the first inning yesterday. I want to say it took the Giants 6 weeks before they hit their first 3 run bomb of this season but if I’m wrong feel free to correct me.

Reading the comments from Sabean and the “Brain Trust” from their press conference is very troubling because it looks like they are going Recycle 2017 v. 2 more.

As I started to argue last off-season, there is no question in my mind we have to do what Sabes did whem he first got here and did the massive shakeup by trading Matt Williams…and sadly I don’t think we get anywhere near the haul we got for Matty Williams. But for fiscal sanity reasons (we have to start paying Bum at some point right???) and at least Cain is going (is he taking the $7.5 buyout?). Cueto will be stupid to opt out. I see no way to changing things until we make a big move and trading Posey is it IMO. Does not even sound like Sabes and Co were serious about the Giancarlo pursuit…

the trade chip has to be Bum. Nobody wants Posey and that enormous bloated contract–especially with his power swing nearly gone. Bum still has value, even if it’s mostly rooted in the mystique. And he costs nearly nothing.

Flemming himself said on KNBR a few weeks ago that the Giants must get power bats. Defense and pitching is great, but if you can’t compete against your opponents in hitting HRs, you are dead meat for the season at Opening Day. I’m not a big Flemm fan, but the dude sees the Giants vs. the league up close for 6 months. If he is saying this, I believe it. With the juiced ball now in regular play, this line about not needing much more power to get back in contention in 2018 is total CRAP…

Marcell Ozuna was mentioned in the Chris Haft article as possible trade bait. What about him? He’s a beast with the bat. Defensively he can’t be any worse than the bozos we trotted out there this year.

Sure. The question is gonna be, what does the new Marlin ownership group want to accomplish? I’m assuming Jeter wants to win as quickly as possible. Does ditching the payroll of Stanton make much sense to them? They’d probably get a lot for Ozuna too.

You cannot trot out Pence, Span, Gorkys, and MacParker out there again. The ENTIRE outfield needs to be replaced. Can they do it – likely not. But, it’s not impossible. You cannot roll out 3 players every game out of 8 position dudes that basically will deliver 40 HRs or less, in total, in a season. It’s impossible now to get into the post season with this kind of limp OF offense, unless your pitching staff strikes out 15 guys a game — even then that might not be enough, because 2 HRs from the oppo with a man on each will win the game against this limp offense…

You know they even bother bringing up Williamson name anymore in their postseason evaluations,
so he has no future with this team except for a throw in trade chip will little value,. God this team sucks with no clue on evaluation of players!!

Watching this game, two teams with good, young players and only one will advance — were the Rockies and D-Backs showcased even once on Sunday Night Baseball this season? Seemed like it was the usual Yanks-Red Sox-Cubs-Cards the majority of the games.

Here’s some stats I did for the NL this season. Power is power is now the name of the game.
I took ERA and HRs per game. Divide the ERA (lower is better) by HRs per game (higher is better). Arguably the team with the lower ERA and higher HRs/game will generate a combined stat that lower is better, a type of pitching/power combo metric. Doghairs are best with a 2.478 lowest pitching/power stat with 4 of top 5 teams with this metric in the post season, and Brewers just missing the Wild Card. The gatekeeping stat line for this metric seems to be around 3.00 to be in contention for a playoff spot. Rocks are the anomaly at 3.8, probably a stadium adjustment factor or look at their overall Slg. Giants are worst with this P/P metric at 5.695. Note the Giants HRs/game at .79 is the worst in the NL by far. The NL average is 1.208 HRs per game, with a standard deviation of .1848 about that mean. The Giants are a full 2.26 standard deviations below the mean HRs/game, far worse than the runner up dogmeat Pirates that are just 1.49 standard deviations below the HR/game mean. Note however, the Giants are in the middle of the pack pitching wise, with a 4.50 ERA. If the Giants HR/game rate stays around the same next year, even if they magically improved their ERA to 3.38 like the Doghairs this season, their pitching / power metric would still be crap and out of the running at 4.278. If they got Stanton and he hit 60 HRs with everybody else hitting the same HRs as 2017, the Giants HR/game rate would spike to 1.16, but they’d still need to magically pare their ERA way down from 4.50 to 3.50 to get their pitching/power ratio down to around the gatekeeping 3.0 postseason P/P metric qualifier level. Upshot: Giants need way more power to get into post season contention for next year. Even 60 additional jacks is unlikely to get it done, even if they have a major improvement in ERA…

The next time Larry Baer mentions the Diamondback turnaround from 2016 to 2017 as an example of what the Giants might do, I hope someone reminds him that the biggest change the DBacks made after the 2016 season was firing the GM and thoroughly retooling their baseball operations in the front office.

Posey finished the season with an .861 OPS in 565 plate appearances. He played Gold Glove defense at catcher and played solid defense in his firstbase starts. It’s possible the thumb that was injured on a tag at home dogged him in the second half of the season, hurting his HR total.

A great game. I started out rooting for Az because they match up well vs Dodgers ( vs Rox). But I hate AZ. Rox don’t scare me. never have, never will. Az has a good core, and playoff money and excitement brings more fans and more money. I believe long term that Az being good hurts Giants. LA already very good, a young core, very rich, and will finish ahead of us for at least a few more years. This will be my only happy thought if the Dodgers do win…

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Timmy is 34 now. And I want to say “only 34”. And he’s been pretty much done for awhile. I can’t really even imagine how that would feel, to be *done* before the age of 35. Because, you know, my career has just been one long upward trajectory with no end in sight…